To Shut Down You Computer Overnight Or Not

[retrocop]

My wife insists that the desktop family computer be shut down last thing at night as she is worried about hacking risks.
I find it a pain when the computer has been left for a day or three in shut down mode and when re-booting await,sometimes, a considerable time for Windows to update or reconfigure.
My argument is that many companies leave their office computers on overnight, so, providing one logs out of the programme being used e.g. on line banking, e-bay, AB etc there is likely to be no more risk of unauthorised access than having shut down the PC entirely. I take on board the chance of night time burglary but that aside along with the 'green' issues
What is the consensus of opinion from the AB experts please?

[hc4361]

I leave mine on and it automatically goes to sleep, very quick to wake up

OG, why do you use a screensaver? You're just wasting electricity

[bhg481]

Not only electricity, it takes computing power as well, so slows the machine down when you're using it. Screen savers date back to the days of cathode-ray tube monitors, which could acquire a ghost image if left displaying the same contents for a long time. The advent of LED monitors made screen savers redundant.

[gingejbee]

"prefer not to have electrical goods working all night"......fridge, freezer, any sort of video recording device, clock radio, microwave etc.
You unplug them all at night?

[IJKLM]

Hesitate to enter the hornets' nest, but as I understand it, htere are four options for when you leave your machine for a while

* On
* Sleep
* Hibernate
* Off

Leaving the machine on uses a lot of power, and the screens can be set to remain on, or to switch off after a while. This is useful if you want to run a background program like bitcoin mining, or SETI or other computer resource-sharing program.

Sleep mode will keep everything running, and might wake up at regular intervals to check emails, or when there is a contact request from elsewhere on the network. If none of these hings happen, the disk and the display will switch off after a pre-determined period.

Hibernate is a more extreme form of sleep, in that the machine saves a lot of state data to the disk, and then more or less switches off. Disk off; screen off; processor off; networking off. When you wake it, the disk spins up, and then restores the saved data (which programs are running, open windows, memory allocations etc).

In the off mode, then everything is off. IN order to restart, it has to load the OS, and all the separate programs and so on.

The machine will probably carry out Windows updates in On and Sleep mode, but not in Hibernate or Off modes.

There was an argument a few years ago that the thermal and physical shock of starting a disk and stopping it a couple of times a day was more damaging than running the disk permanently. I think that has more or less gone away now, so there is a recommendation to minimise power consumption, and the components will survive the various shocks.

I have a couple of Mac laptops. My main machine is switched off every evening, and on again in the morning.

My ultra-portable remains on all the time, but goes to sleep whenever I close the lid.

One of the factors in my decision on whether to switch off/sleep is that I have all SSD drives. These vastly speed up the time from power-on to making the machine available for use.

On a mechanical spinning disk, that can take 5 minutes. On my SSD machines, it is usually less than a minute.

If there is a single upgrade I'd recommend for the impatient computer user, its an SSD drive. You can get a 500MB drive for around GBP100 nowadays

As to managing Windows updates - the Macs allow you to control when those are installed. I think I'd probably use the 'metered connection' setting on Windows to give me back control of when to install various updates.

Personally, I would discount the hacking issue. If you have the right software, you will see that there are many probes, testing the security of your machine each hour. If your defences are weak, you'll probably be hacked while on chatting AB. If they are strong, then you can leave it on all night with no real increase in risk.

Absolutely, you should never remain logged in to sensitive sites unless you are actively using the connection. Personally, I always log out of every vaguely sensitive website that I am not actively using (including AB).

[ToraToraTora]

i'd be looking at why it takes so long to start up. Yes, err indoors is correct shut it down.

[TTG]

Once you have an ssd, you will never go back to using a mechanical hard drive. Best investment you can make with pc/laptop.

[Peter Pedant]

yeah agree hibernate or sleep

and yeah it will update ...

instead of worrying about being hacked - I dont do internet banking so it means they cant get anything of interest or if they do they have to shift their arrisses into my local bank

[fender62]

sleep mode

[retrocop]

A final many thanks for all the time you have all afforded me on this query. I will hibernate for a while ,perhaps, and see if my desktop does actually update.I also have a standby desktop in my den and know that should I require it after a few months non use it will take yonks to update.

[Old_Geezer]

Screen saver is useful. Turns off most of the screen without it looking as if the PC's gone down.

[Old_Geezer]

So very very very very very clearly not redundant.

[Old_Geezer]

Nor a waste of electricity.

[hc4361]

If you say so, OG. But I know for a fact the most expensive part of pc to run is the screen.